Academia Is Eating Its Young

Interesting, thank you for sharing.

I think it's a major problem that there is no external accountability. The grants are scored by peer professors, based on publications (which again requires approval by peers). This creates a bunch of problems 1) it's very easy for entire field or subfield to go down the wrong track, and have no way of getting out of that track because the professors controlling grants and publications are the ones doing the bad research. 2) there is a bias towards publishing research that shows some new finding, rather than research that shows that they could not re-produce some previous science. The entire idea of basing science off of peer review is erroneous IMO, science should advance via replication.

In my ideal world, research would be funded in three, independent streams: 1) Prize based. The government would allocate a yearly budget of some very large amount of money - say $30 billion. It would create competitions and prizes in all sorts of fields. Example contests might include: self-driving car race, robot soccer olympics, longest battery life for $x of total materials used for making the battery, most yield of a plant strain per acre, etc. Teams would receive money for their research in return for placing or winning the contests. Research teams would also get money for achieving objective milestones:

2) Commission based. The government needs some new technology, maybe an upgrade of stealth tech for their fighter planes, so it pays a research institute to develop that tech. Unlink grant based funding, the commission is granted by the outsiders who need the tech, not by professors in the field giving to it to fellow professors.

3) Open Ended Institutional Funding. A certain number of reputable institutions should simply be given permanent annual funding. No grant process, no paperwork, no bureaucracy. The researchers would be overseen by an executive director, and the executive director would be overseen by a board of directors. The board of directors would consist of outside experts with a proven track record. For example, the board of a computer science research university would have people like Google's Urs Hölzle or Guido or Trevor Blackwell. The researchers would not have to apply for grants. They would just have to convince the board of directors that they were generally working on projects that had potential benefit to humanity, or else they would get fired. Every institution would be actually independent, governed by the personal judgement of that institutions board of directors.

Wow, this is an interesting article and I agree with much of it. I've had my PhD for about 2 years now (neurobiology) and I agree that academia is eating..itself. The inefficiency, politics, hostility are some of the things, but much like any other governmental thing, it's just run poorly...and that trickles down to the PIs, students, departments etc. [edit] this got really long, I'm going to create a blog post on this instead and host it at another time [/edit]

Here is an example:I applied to a training grant (t32) that will pay my salary and help me through my PhD. It was not funded initially because my PI's funding was running out in a year. I was applying for funds to continue my education so my PI wouldn't have to pay me (so we could use that money for my research), but they wouldn't fund me because my PI was running out of funds...to fund me.

I resubmitted the exact same grant, with zero changes, but I included a letter staying that I'd be covered if my PI ran out of money. Then I got funded. Total time? 1 Year! It took a year for a paragraph to propagate through the granting agency, as I had to resubmit the grant again and wait 6 months to get a vague answer (priority score).

This is one of many examples I have that are consistent with the OPs article, the system is broken. And this is a wide spread problem that is going to require all of science to really make a change happen. I'm intending on doing so with my startup (just applied to YC) to bring transparency, efficiency, and opportunity to scientists. My goal is to bring the semantic web to academic science to start linking data sets between fields. Positive, negative and pilot data all available in one spot so I can run meta analysis on these data and create preliminary data for a grant or future studies. (there is more to it, but this isn't the place to plug my site)

What I'm most concerned about isn't the technology, it's the people using the technology. I recently got this comment, "Wow, that is a brilliant idea....but good luck getting scientists to use it." The dinosaurs are scared of change, and their fear(ignorance?) is by far the hardest thing I'm going up against. It's also one of the biggest problems we are going to have in science.

Still gotta try though:)

We openly tell researchers that crowdfunding isn't for everyone, at least not yet.

If it isn't valuable for you, that doesn't mean it can't be valuable for anyone else. Just don't do it and wait around for others to validate it.

I don't believe you're being an asshole. You're just picking up the mantle that being a scientist automagically entitles you to know what's best for other scientists.

It's still doing it.

Thanks for the response. You included real world examples from academia, and your supportive attitude means a lot to us.

I'm really interested in what you're working on. If you need help with your YC app, send me an email and I'd be happy to look through it. (denny_at_microryza.com) I'm always happy to hear what other scientists are working on.

Keep going!